sports editor

Sports entertainment

Sports entertainment is a type of spectacle which presents an ostensibly competitive event using a high level of theatrical flourish and extravagant presentation, with the purpose of entertaining an audience. Commonly, but not in all cases, the outcomes are predetermined (such cases are not considered to be fixed, however, as it is an open secret). Events which fall under the classification of sports entertainment are widely considered to be low brow forms of entertainment.

Some forms of sports entertainment involve taking competitive games which are usually considered minor in the grand scheme of things, such as dodgeball, poker, or rock-paper-scissors, and televising them with trumped-up theatrics, such as celebrity competitors or elaborate audiovisual packages. Televised thumb wrestling such as Thumb Wrestling Federation is an example of this type of sports entertainment.

History

The term came into prominence in the 1980s through its use by Vince McMahon and the World Wrestling Federation, in order to avoid governmental athletic regulation, and it is explicitly used in advertisements by the Harlem Globetrotters. Precursors have been found going back to February 1935, when Toronto Star sports editor Lou Marsh described professional wrestling as "sportive entertainment."

While the concept of sports entertainment is generally applied only to modern creations, it can also be applied to traditional public spectacles such as bull fighting or even the gladiatorial fights of the ancient Roman Colosseum.

Sports entertainment has a stigma of mindless pop culture, and has been criticized as such in popular media. The film Idiocracy portrays a future where sports entertainment permeates the global culture: the president is an active champion professional wrestler and capital punishment consists of a combination demolition derby, monster truck event and gladiator duel, and is a highly popular television broadcast. Fiction with a dystopian future setting often portrays deadly futuristic games as popular sports entertainment, including the movies Rollerball and The Running Man, video games such as Smash TV and the Twisted Metal series, and the roleplaying gameShadowrun, which features Urban Brawl and Combat Biking.